Interview with Julien Tartarin (Mailjet)

I interviewed Julien Tartarin, Mailjet founder to find out more. This interview is the ninety sixth in a series of DW interviews. Big thank you to Julien for the interview!

How would you describe Mailjet in under 50 words?

Mailjet is a Cloud-Based service. We send, track and deliver emails. Our service is easy to use and easy to integrate via SMTP or with our API. We focus On real time and deliverability. We’re an all in one solution: Mailjet sends all your emails: bulk and transactional.

What made you decide to start working on Mailjet?

Sending email has always been easy, but during these last years, delivering it to the inbox has become very complicated. I’ve realized this in my previous jobs where I needed to configure and optimize email servers.

According to Return Path, more than 25% of legitimate email doesn’t reach the inbox. This can be disastrous (think about apps, online retailers, etc.).

For developers, making sure that email is getting delivered represents a huge amount of work. But they often need to focus on their product rather than on email delivery… I knew it, so I came up with the following idea: provide a very simple solution, ensuring that the message is successfully getting delivered to the recipient.

Eventually, the idea got “bigger”, and the objective became what Mailjet is today: an email platform used to send, track and deliver. Our customers are not only developers: even a perfect rookie can create and send a Newsletter with Mailjet!

Could you explain ‘deliverability’ to those that don’t know what it means?

The term is often misused. It isn’t in the dictionary yet: this problematic emerged not very long ago. Elie, our Digital Marketing Manager, defines the term “deliverability” this way:

“deliverability refers to the ability that an email has of successfully reaching the inbox of its recipients. It’s not an indicator, it’s an objective”.

Who is the team behind Mailjet?

There’s me of course :) But if Mailjet is doing so well it’s also because we’ve been able to set up a terrific team. Wilfried Durand was working for tuto.com but he loved the idea I had. I knew him from college. After I’ve talked to him about the idea, he did a bit of networking and convinced Thibaud Elzière, Founder of Fotolia, to join the project. Thibaud seed funded the venture, with the help of Quentin Nickmans. Quentin is now Mailjet’s CEO. Nicolas Chaunu, the Founder of tuto.com also joined as a strategic advisor.

Where are you based?

We are based in Paris, France. But we have just expanded to four other countries. We have actually opened some offices in Spain (Madrid), Germany (Berlin), United Kingdom (London) and the United States (San Francisco!). So now we are…everywhere!

We really want to remain close to our customers. This is why we don’t only make our platform accessible in different languages: we also want to have a local implantation.

What technologies have you used to build Mailjet?

I don’t want to provide a lot of details on this, it is kind of secret for now. But what is important to know is that we have our own proprietary technology to route the emails. This is a huge advantage: a lot of our competitors use some third party services at some point of the process, but we don’t. Except maybe for the IP reputation monitoring: we work with Return Path, the leader in this industry.

Where do you see Mailjet in 5 years time?

Our objective is quite ambitious: we want to impose our new model as a reference. For now there are not many Email Service Providers offering as much flexibility as we do. Liberty and simplicity are at the core of our product. Meanwhile, the traditional players work in a completely different way: long term contracts, training requirements to use the tools, etc. We are the complete opposite.

So in 5 years, we hope that Mailjet will have changed the game and imposed itself as the reference in the email domain!

What are you most excited about at the moment?

There are so many things going on… The new version of the platform and the expansion to other countries are very exciting. But we have quite a few other things on the schedule. So what I am the most excited about at the moment is what we will announce in the coming weeks: a handy tool and some unique features. Sorry I can’t say more now!

Can you convince the reader to start using Mailjet in under 50 words?

Mailjet grows very rapidly for a good reason: we offer the best value. We are easy to use and easy to integrate. Rather than words, the best solution is to experience what we have to offer. Because our basic plan is free, the best solution is to simply test us!